I just wrote a rant on some random post on another instance about Trump not liking EVs where I said that EVs are dumb, and I’d like to share my thoughts here.
EVs do not really make cars sustainable. They just shift the polution from the cars themselves to some far-away coal or gas plant. But even if we got 100% renewable energy, they would still not be sustainable since their batteries are cancer to nature (do a search on the internet about lithium mining or cobalt mining).
So, how do I propose we solve the car question? Public transit is the answer.
Now, I won’t elaborate much on public transit since most urbanism Youtube channels can explain it way better than me (just don’t watch Azov Something, please), but I’d like to talk about the situation in Brazil.
Brazil is a place where we have a grid with almost 100% renewables (mainly hydrelectrics), so EVs would be nice here, wouldn’t they?
NO!!!
Here in Brazil we have also a huge sugarcane production, which goes to make ethanol (biofuel) and sugar. Ethanol is pretty based, sugar is not (I do agree that sugar is tasty though). So, since most cars in Brazil can run on any mixture of ethanol and gasoline thanks to their “flex” engines (yes, this is their real name), if the price of ethanol falls, no one will use gasoline, and then we get a carbon-neutral fleet of cars (which is still bad for the environment, but less so than going full gasoline). And since lots of sugarcane goes to make sugar, if we incentivize producers to produce ethanol instead, we can get more ethanol without having to clear more land for farming!
This concludes my rant on EVs.
edit: I do not like Trump at all. I just noticed that my post makes it seem like I agree with him, but I do not. In fact, he likes internal combustion engines and big oil, which is why he said that EVs are “madness”. I do not agree with that. I just think that EVs are the new “technology that will save the world” trend and that they won’t really save the world. It is imperative that we progress into socialism, or else we will be destined to fall to barbarism.
Tractors and irrigation and crop dusting and pest control and combines all use energy, shipping the crop to an ethanol plant uses energy, the plant itself needs energy to operate (not to mention get built in the first place!), and then the finished ethanol product needs to be shipped out to be mixed into fuel at a refinery. Added complexity means more steps where energy is wasted and carbon is emitted.
It’s a net negative, unless renewables are used at every step of that process. Even then, it’s a waste of labor and energy and infrastructure and resources.
Yes, but as I said, we already have all that infrastructure in Brazil, and it is way cheaper to get people to use ethanol than to get them to switch to electric in the short term.
Carbon neutrality in automotives are a means to an end, which is to get transportation to net-zero. To actually get to net-zero, the only real way would be to get everyone to use public transit (there is not enough electricity in the world for powering a electric fleet of millions of cars). So, I still think that as a temporary solution until public transit becomes good enough of an option, electric cars are (at least in Brazil) way worse than regular cars running on ethanol.
In other countries, electric cars may be better, especially on countries from the imperial core (western Europe, USA, Canada, Japan) becase the population has enough money to buy EVs if they get cheaper. But in poorer, overexploited countries, most people can’t even buy a new gasoline-powered car from the dealership, so why would they buy a new electric-powered car from the dealership? They will obviously just continue to buy used gasoline-powered cars like normal.
Private car ownership should be abolished, neither ethanol nor electric are even carbon neutral. How much carbon is emitted manufacturing the car itself? How much is emitted maintaining the absurd amount of infrastructure needed to support cars? How much is emitted acquiring the resources to make components and batteries.
It’s all a fucking lie! Carbon neutrality is a myth made up by the car industry to trick people into thinking they can have their cake and eat it too.
And as long as we invest more into cars, the necessary public transportation infrastructure isn’t getting built.